THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - POST PRODUCTION *SOUND DESIGN*

My short film, The Alchemist Makes Gold, is still currently in the hands of motion graphics artist Dino Tsaousis who is doing additional editing and working out some digital effects. In the meantime, I'm starting preparation for sound design.

I've started on a Sound Map of the Alchemist. I separate each scene and then do grouping of the sounds for the corresponding scene. Concrete sounds, Musical sounds and Voice sounds. Luckily, the Alchemist is incredibly simple when it comes to voice sounds, they only really pertain to the two characters when they're speaking, the characters are never in an environment where other people are having conversations. The concrete sounds are fairly straight forward, though they begin to get a little complicated, as there are lot of noises that would be considered "concrete" but which weren't actually audible enough to be recorded on location--things such as, bubbling, boiling, sputtering, fire flickering, etc. So, those all have to be notated and then recorded separately. The "musical" sounds are the hardest to pin down. The "music" of the Alchemist isn't exactly music, I call it a "soundscape". It is composed of industrial noises, mechanical noises, the sounds of the woods/forest, and then building shimmering sounds, glowing sounds, whooshing and resonant/hollow sounds. Basically, the soundscape is the most interpretive and complex, as it requires creating concrete sounds to relate to abstract concepts. I guess this is always what music is, but I don't want the soundscape to sound quite like music or quite like it could be the real environment. It resides in a sort of in between place, an indefinable place. Anyway, this is where Alchemist stands now. A chugging along process. I'm nervous and excited to see where all of this leads.